Archive for November, 2015

So we’re not even out of November, Thanksgiving hasn’t even come and gone yet, and already the fake “victims” of the evangelical, conservative “Christian” right are ramping up their annual pity party known as “The War on Christmas.” Years ago when this was becoming a thing on Fox News and conservative talk radio, it seemed like the kind of bad joke that no one would be stupid enough to go along with. Now it’s an annual movement filled with piously self-righteous people declaring their faith under attack while it is in fact them attacking anyone and everyone else who won’t worship as they do.

It’s that time of year again. We’ve already seen the stores pack up their Halloween products a week before Halloween in order to make room for their Christmas merchandise, some of the terrestrial and satellite radio stations are already switching over to all Christmas music formats weeks in advance of Thanksgiving, and store managers everywhere are plotting their survival plan for Black Friday with the kind of detail that one would expect to see in a major military offensive. Black Friday is coming, and, even worse, the false Black Friday news media narrative is being dusted off and readied in news rooms everywhere.

So yesterday was my birthday where I added yet another year on top of a lot of others. You hit a certain point where you do get a little reflective about where you’ve been, what you’ve seen, and what’s changed since “back when I was a kid.” I actually passed the traditional starting point for that a while back, but it still hits me on birthdays. So when I started writing this for a site about geeky pop culture- actually the day before my birthday –I started thinking about decades of fandom and geek culture.

So Ben Carson was at a presser where he was getting pressed about the long list of personal- and sometimes rather self-aggrandizing -stories he’s thrown around that are coming apart at the seams now that people are bothering to actually look at them. In response to this, he seemed to have a mental breakdown and started whining about press interest in Obama, but doing so on a subject that tends to indicate Carson easily confuses bogus conservative chain emails for actual facts. This would probably remain funny if it was just Carson losing his mind for a few minutes in front of the cameras, but now the Marching Morons are crawling out to flood social media with the same bogus, long ago debunked and discredited garbage in post after post, and meme after meme. This would be the “sealed school records” conspiracy popularized by people with more teeth than functional brain cells.